It’s simple really. Ideology. Or as the kids call it: brain rot.

There is no question that people have values and convictions. Nor would we contend that a judge would not bring any of those things with them into the courtroom. What is strange is how certain people believe that anyone could be truly neutral by nature rather than, say, conviction or practice.

This is the paradox that has ruled the US since the 1960s: that pure neutrality could be possible. And, at the same time, it is impossible. Consider the affection for Walter Cronkite and later, the Fairness Doctrine. Or consider that favorite phrase of Chief Justice John Roberts: that his job is simply to call balls and strikes.

The irony of this metaphor is not that Supreme Court justices would make terrible baseball umpires. It is that Roberts loves to pick and choose which pitches he will decide to call. And when a conservative is on the mound, they all happen to get called as strikes.

Bias and the binary

The problem with the talk of left/right partisanship and political bias is that it isn’t an honest assessment. It forces everything into a binary left/right sorting machine that distorts our understanding of truth. One that easily names that there are six conservatives on the court and three liberals, while failing to recognize the wide variance in ideology these justices represent.

One thing that has stuck with me a long time is the brazenness of the likes of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito to claim a judicial philosophy that blends a kind of pedantic literalism with a subjective conservatism. But because we’re addicted to the binary we look for a complementary liberal judicial philosophy which ultimately sounds a lot closer to the umpire metaphor than anything else.

This heuristic that defaults toward the binary keeps misidentifying the threat of the Roberts Court while limiting the rational vision of the minority. We see this in the coverage every time the Court makes a ruling.

Creating complexity

Since Citizens United, the Supreme Court has preferred process over substance, which is also to say it has chosen precision and an extreme expression of individualism over obvious, substantive, or realistic. This is how it can find a constitutional right to discriminate and yet fail to even account for the discriminated.

We find the same in the extraordinary lengths they go to enshrine a right to not only have, but carry and use firearms in public — and, again, not consider in any discernible way, the impact on communities.

Well then, you might think this is merely an ideological preference for individual rights and the narrow reading of law. They are smart, perhaps biased, yes. But otherwise this is just being human, right? Oops, not so fast. Because when it comes to policing, everything is constitutional. After the second amendment, they pretty much ignore three through nine, offering broad rights to law enforcement to lie, search, seize property, entrap, coerce, surveil, and cruelly punish people. They even argued that juries shouldn’t expect to be properly informed of procedure.

In other words, this isn’t a consistent, discernible legal framework. It’s political ideology, power, and shaping the law to conform in specific places and fundamentally not in others.

Now, the point for us here is not to merely name a particular hypocrisy in the thinking. Nor is it to brand some of the justices on the Supreme Court hypocrites. It is to explicitly show how unserious the majority on the Supreme Court is when it comes to understanding how the United States should relate to its Constitution. For heaven’s sake, they’ve set a standard of selective mind reading.

Rejecting the real world

The Supreme Court has functionally chosen to reject the real world as part of the equation, treating the law as some pure, pristine treasure where their work wholly resides. This would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening. Its like we’re all on a bus with a driver who confesses he was a wiz at Bus Simulator on Playstation, but doesn’t think the experience of driving an actual bus matters much . . . while driving an actual bus.

This is the lie baked into the fundamentalism of whatever ideology certain justices claim to follow: originalism, textualism, which often comes out like a YouTube cook who instructs us to “measure with your heart.”

The binary sort demands we name a liberal counter, which often gets called concern for the constitution as a “living document”. But the thrust of the Court’s minority is mostly treating reality as part of the equation. They tend to be textualists who tend to also think maybe the Court concern itself with what law does in fact do. This sounds a lot less like liberalism and a lot more like just being a good judge.

This is why the common understanding of maintaining a fundamentally neutral Court fails to keep the Court truly neutral. It isn’t just that it has a majority of conservative justices and minority of liberal ones. It is that we refuse to check our vision of neutrality itself.

The majority hates neutrality

In its avoidance of reality, it is building precedence of neutrality that isn’t functionally neutral. We see this best in its rejection of affirmative action, the quintessential problem for what counts as neutral in the perfect mind palace of a justice and is anything but in the real world.

By claiming that the law doesn’t need to worry about outcomes, just process, it puts a finger on the scale toward those who benefit from the abandonment of affirmative action. And further, it pretends that equality is something that exists or manifests magically.

They know this is bullshit, though. Precisely because they know how much of the matter they are choosing not to consider as relevant to the case. It’s like the college friend who swore up and down that he, as a giant white guy, a total goliath, had no perceptible advantage over the five-foot mousey girl debating him in class. The advantage is obvious, to reject the innate cultural bias toward deep voices is absurd. If we are being fair, we’d acknowledge that deep voices are more likely to be trusted as authoritative, for example. But for him to ignore, not only this truth, but my assertion of it as true is for him to assert a truth and then ignore the counter assertion as irrelevant. He just gets to claim everyone’s equal and nobody can debate it.

This is the Roberts Court on affirmative action. But its also the Roberts Court on reality. See its decision on public prayer, which is based on a strained precedent of sincerely-held belief, which also doesn’t seem to care when the belief comes from outside Christian evangelicalism.

The Court has given up

All of this is, I guess, preamble to get to the latest rot coming from the Supreme Court. In Trump vs. CASA, the Court has chosen to interpret that it, the Court, does not have the authority to block the president universally. An interpretation that is at odds with pretty much all of American history. And like the many verdicts before it, demonstrates an utter disinterest in how things actually work.

In her own dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t mince words:

“The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.”

This is why the obsession with process alone; cleaving the substance from of law; leaves the Court itself utterly bankrupt and without value. Like the decision to allow police officers to lie, to the point of encouraging them to lie, erodes the court’s general pursuit of truth. I’m reminded of a 2022 case against Barry Jones and David Ramirez in which Justice Clarence Thomas made an inaccurate statement about the defendants and refused to correct it.

He chose to do this knowing nobody wanted it in the record. Knowing that he was setting precedent for lower courts. Knowing he had just lied to the American people, to the Court, and to every person who will read that document in the future and got caught doing it. He knew what he was doing.

In all of the talk of the integrity of the Supreme Court and the need for the Court to function well, even to the point of political sacrifice, how little do we push back against its many blatant lies, its rejection of truth, and most importantly, its avoidance of the real world. To set as a standard that we can’t hold the president accountable for breaking the law, but individuals can sue him over it? That is insane.

And given the public’s favorite definition of insanity, it is almost as insane as assuming the Court will just get good.